A contrarian blog, because the majority is wrong about a lot of stuff.

December 17, 2012

Clueless Amy Chozick

But the gap she writes about has nothing to do with generations, it has to do with social class. Her parents are high-prole or middle class, and she moved to New York City and learned to mimic the eating habits of her SWPL friends. If she had stayed in Texas and got a job as a nurse, there woudn’t have been any sort of gap.

Not that I necessarily mock all SWPL foods. Most prole food tastes pretty crappy; the emphasis is on huge portions rather than taste. But occasionally there’s a baby floating around in the bathwater of prole food, as long as you don’t mind eating the food in an aesthetically unpleasing environment. Although you will never get a decent salad in a prole restaurant, not ever; proles only know iceberg lettuce.

On the salad thing HS is 100% correct. And don't give me bullshit about how they can't afford this and that. If they can afford to waste their wholly undeserved salaries (the proles I've met are stupendously overpaid, especially the females who often do public service clerical bullshit) on shotguns for their deadbeat redneck boyfriend, the iPhone glued to their hands and their daily ritual of Diet Mountain Dew, chain restaurant wings, trashy college-branded short shorts, hood sweatshirts, flip flops, knock-off handbags and bump-its, then they can afford some f****** arugula.

For years I've heard there's been a mainstreaming of good food. Since I'm relatively young, I couldn't say coffee and bread is better today than I could say marijuana is more potent. But in this case, I believe those sources over Half Sigma.

Prole food in Louisiana is very good. Try Cajun/Creole cuisine. Crappy versions of Cajun/Creole food are sold in over-priced tourist restaurants in New Orleans, but restaurants for locals serve excellent food.

What is "prole food" today is elegant tomorrow. Please allow me to quote something I wrote months ago:

"In the old days, English servants got tired of eating lobster, and had their masters sign agreements limiting the number of times lobster would be served to the staff. Today, lobster is food for the rich.

"Spanish peasants mixed sweet fruit juice with shitty wine to make a palatable beverage. Now the wealthy pay extra money to drink diluted wine because 'sangria' is fashionable.

"If you want to know what the rich will eat in a hundred years, dine with the peasantry of today."

Also, I wish SWPLs would realize that as population densities increase their favorite foods are going to become more expensive. The SWPLs would be doing themselves a great favor to embrace the 1970s environmentalist movement's belief in the importance of stopping population growth.

I like prole food, especially when compared to SWPL cuisine like sushi and whatever vegan slop they somehow manage to imbibe regularly. But you're definitely right about prole salads, they really are terrible.

I find it humorous that someone who grew up in San Antonio is complaining that the food has no taste. I have eaten in San Francisco and the normal restaurants generally were much more expensive and less flavorful that many of the local restaurants in San Antonio.

I have always suspected that SWPL just like what they are told to like. Maybe the writer is unknowning falling for one of the traps identified by Tyler Cowen that one should not eat at restaurants where good looking young women eat.

Even the Waffle House (!) has something they call the Chicken Apple Pecan Salad.

It seems like it is impossible to find an iceberg salad anywhere. Except maybe a steakhouse where you can get the classic iceberg wedge with blue cheese. A bit of a shame because iceberg is unfairly maligned.

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Speaking of declasse- could anything be worse than turning a meal with your parents into an article so you could:
1. brag about your sophisticate coastal life styles
2. brag about your sophisticated food palates
3. try to write off a $300 restaurant check

Chozick really is a pathetic failure of a writer. This one observation + two expert quotes = article style of writing was embarrassing 10 years ago when Mickey Kaus called it out. In 2012 when so many actual writers have been fired, to find this brat sitting atop the NYT churning out oblivious by-the-numbers filler seems to smack of criminal.

[HS: Applebees may be more middle-class than prole. And there may be a phenomenon of SWPL drift which I should look into.]

I'm not saying the food is necessarily bad at those places - but if you are inviting some lawyers or investment bankers to dinner and you mention one of those restaurants, you will be instantly pegged as "not one of us."

Wendy's recently upgraded its burgers and buns. They probably have the best drive-through fast food burgers of any national chain. But there are plenty of higher end fast casual burger chains these days with higher quality burgers -- Five Guys, Smash Burger, Shake Shack, etc. If you're in New York, drop $27 on the Black Label Burger at The Minetta Tavern. That's an expensive burger that's actually not overpriced. Really quite good. And if you don't want to spend that much, the triple prime burger (if they still have it) at Ruby Tuesday's is/was excellent cooked medium or medium rare. I just haven't been there in years because the ambiance is kind of depressing.

Yeah. I remember a time I actually stayed on Staten Island. It was some years ago - I had a consulting assignment. They put me up in a so-so mass market hotel. The neighborhood was heavily Italian, so I went out one evening looking for some good local food. I found what looked to be a pretty appealing Italian place, which I thought, given the ethnicity of the locals, ought to be good. So i tried it for dinner. The food was absolutely awful. The next evening I took the ferry to Manhattan for some better fare.

Not only do they have sushi in supermarkets now, but I've been to several branches of the Hannaford chain --in New Hampshire, no less--where they have a actual Japanese guy wearing a Japanese chef's hat and whatever the male version of the kimono robe is called chopping it up with the lightning Japanese chopping technique and arranging the platters with the exquisite Oriental sense of harmony and balance that is conceptually unattainable to Westerners.

"Also, I wish SWPLs would realize that as population densities increase their favorite foods are going to become more expensive. The SWPLs would be doing themselves a great favor to embrace the 1970s environmentalist movement's belief in the importance of stopping population growth."

Considering that (in large part) about the only regions that are reproducing significantly above a 2.1 population replacement level now are in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, that Malthusian problem is receding. In fact, world population is expected to plateau by the year 2100.

"I agree with just speculating... most people just eat what tastes good. I believe Mayor Bloomberg has confessed to a Cheez-It addiction".

A savvy eater in NYC would know where to get freshly made, tasty and reasonably priced bagels, which are usually made by prole Jews. Go to a SWPLish Whole Foods or some expensive fancy foodstore to get a bag of prepackaged bagels, and you are an idiot who doesn't know how to spend your money wisely, even if you're rich that is. Mayor Bloomberg will tell you this.

@Peter Shark, I did specify, "not a chain or a diner." I believe the examples you cited are chains.

What HS calls prole food I call regional working class food. And I think a lot of it is great.

Salads, big deal. Salad is a very middle class female thing to eat, anyway, why are you eating it, HS? Human beings didn't evolve to put all that added fat in the form of vegetable oil (dressing) on greens.

"Not only do they have sushi in supermarkets now, but I've been to several branches of the Hannaford chain --in New Hampshire, no less--where they have a actual Japanese guy wearing a Japanese chef's hat"

As with most sushi chefs, except maybe at some of the very highest-end restaurants, he's actually Chinese.

[HS: That's correct, the majority of Asian people working at Japanese restaurants are NOT Japanese, because Japanese people in the United States tend to work at white collar jobs.]

It's not an easy task to figure out whether the Cheesecake Factory is more toward the prole or SWPL end of the spectrum. It offers a large assortment of rather creative items that go well into SWPL territory, yet at the same time the over-the-top decor is very much prole. What might be the deciding factor, which tilts the chain in the prole direction, is the cheesecake itself, a fluffy, over-sweetened concoction that seems aimed at prole tasts.

There is a legitimate generational food gap. My parents who are definitely not proles tell me that when they went out to nice diners or dinner parties they had quality food, but in terms of everyday meals and the typical diner food things were pretty much like Chozick describes. Not that they eat that way now.

What you have now is things like Food Carts, Panera, Cosi, Sweet Green, Chop'd, Whole Foods cafe etc. that basically allow you to have some of the less crappy food on a daily basis for lunch etc.

And of course better storage and transportation allows a lot of good ingredients to be available year round.

And she does acknowledge this as a "red-blue" divide too.

And why the "not that I necessarily mock SWPL food"? You do nothing but mock "proles" and praise SWPLs.

"Salads, big deal. Salad is a very middle class female thing to eat, anyway, why are you eating it, HS? Human beings didn't evolve to put all that added fat in the form of vegetable oil (dressing) on greens."

Fat increases nutrient absorption so it's a very good thing to eat salads with added fat. Eating healthy isn't just for middle class females; a whole variety of people are health conscious about food for reasons ranging from illness to fitness.

In defense of iceberg lettuce, it's high in vitamin A and potassium. I feel sorry for iceberg lettuce... it gets insulted almost as often as potatoes.

Fair point JayNE. OK, these days I'd say pretty much any restaurant that is not a chain or a cheap sub/pizza joint is a potential SWPL attraction - either because it's "ethnic", "retro","environmentally conscious" or, sometimes, actually high quality.

Oh, please people. Do you want to know what real healthy food is? It is food that comes from a clean restaurant and a clean kitchen. Restaurant chains like Applebees and MCDonalds have these SWPL haunts beat because they are anal retentive about cleaning. Chain restaurants are scrubbed down every night and their ingredients are rotated to make sure that no one will get sick. They have a lot to lose in that regard.

One of the best meals I ever had: We (family of 5) were driving across State Island about five years ago, got hungry, stopped in a pizza place. The back room had a little sitting area, it was the "restaurant" section, we sat there, got menus, ordered, and it was truly delicious Italian food. Have stopped off several times since, and never been disappointed. You can't always judge a book by its cover.

I actually think in New York that "proles" often eat better than SWPL's. I have had delicious meals in Corona, Queens, for example, where there are lots of South American restaurants. I could go on and on. I have even had excellent Kosher food along Ocean Parkway (and that's hard to do well, in my opinion). Lots of proles, at least in NYC, won't spend their hard-earned money on bad food.

Yes, the cleanliness of (most) mass-market fast-food franchises is a huge plus. Wherever I travel in the world, I tend to gravitate toward McDonald's for that reason. However, while in Helsinki last week I ate in a downtown McDonald's that had a rather filthy dining area. It was unpleasant. The McD's in the United States tend to be very clean.

The open kitchens encourage cleanliness. On two recent occasions, I have eaten in non fast-food restaurants where a door to closed food-preparation areas was left open, and what I saw did not inspire confidence.

I used to live in Houston, where a feature on the local news was the Harris County Health Department's restaurant reports. On the one hand, it was sickening to hear what ordinary restaurants were being cited for. On the other, the public shaming of dirty eating establishments seemed like a good thing. Anyone who has ever lived in Houston knows the "slime in the ice machine" refrain.

Overall, I think we would all be better off thinking more about hygiene when choosing where to eat.

Expensive steakhouses are for wealthy proles. Because social class != income.

Better food is spreading to the wealthier sorts of proles, though the flavors that proles prefer tend to be bolder.

I've gotten into high-end chocolates. (Which is not as expensive as it looks - a $5 chocolate bar has more actual chocolate than 5 $1 chocolate bars.) The first thing that hits you when you have even something as basic as a Lindt 70% bar is "wow, that's chocolatey". Then, if you're a person of taste and discernment, you can start noticing all the more subtle flavor notes and the different textures, etc., etc. But it's still a *lot* more chocolatey than a Hershey bar, even a "special dark".

Map - you're completely ignoring the quality of the food. McDonalds is 100% beef - all the lower-quality cuts ground up together. Even between chains, which all keep clean and sanitary, there are big differences in the quality of the food.

(HS - LA has been doing the letter grade for inspections for ages, and San Francisco just adopted it, too.)

@map, excellent point. The superiority of SWPL food is so much bullshit.

@chesswife, good point about eating fat but it should come in the food you eat (as in meat, or fish) and not added on top. Human beings did not evolve to eat gobs of added fat in the form of oils, butters, etc.

Eating healthfully doesn't necessarily consist of eating salads. The traditional diet of the Mediterranean, and Okinawa, and the Kitavans, doesn't consist of lettuce-based salads.

Chozick comes off as a food snob rather than SWPL. There's been a proliferation of these niches--beer/music/cinema/travel/technology snobs. It's anti-consumerism consumerism.

The snobbery and pseudo-elitism make it as much hipster as SWPL, although I suppose there is overlap. The fact that these phenomena involve conscious, painstaking formation of one's persona (along with heavy doses of posturing and one-upmanship) seems to dovetail with the extended adolescence (through 20's) theories.

I think genuine class differences are less affected and more second nature.

"eaten in San Francisco and the normal restaurants generally much more expensive and less flavorful that many of the local restaurants in San Antonio."

I've lived in San Francisco for 50 years. Went to S.A. once, ate at Paesano's, The Quarry. Very good. Apparently a chain, but more expensive than all but the trendiest SF eateries. Go figure. As far as flavor, here's what happened: flavorful cooking is Italian, period. In the late 1980's, as SWPL came to the fore, Italian went out of style. Italians are mostly conservatives, and liberals know this. So what we got, with help from Alice Waters, was a cooking based on novel ingredients, irrespective of ultimate flavor. That movement has not yet been replaced.

"As far as flavor, here's what happened: flavorful cooking is Italian, period. In the late 1980's, as SWPL came to the fore, Italian went out of style. Italians are mostly conservatives, and liberals know this. So what we got, with help from Alice Waters, was a cooking based on novel ingredients, irrespective of ultimate flavor. That movement has not yet been replaced."

Interesting comment. Last time I was in San Francisco, I went to Alice Waters' place in Berkeley. Worst meal I had in the Bay Area. The most flavorful thing there was the mint ice cream, which had bits of mint leaf in it and tasted vibrantly of mint, but the Meatball Shop in New York actually does this better. Their mint ice cream tastes like desert; Alice's tastes like Tom's of Maine toothpaste.

The best meal I had in SF was at a small plates Italian place, Barbacco.

SWPL food snobbery could be the reason they are so thin while proles are fat. Specifically, the reduced amounts of "polyunsaturated fats" aka "PUFA" aka "Omega-6" in their diet. PUFAs are bad and cause obesity and diabetes.

Non-PUFA oils taste better, but are more expensive. Compare a baked potato with butter vs one with margarine. A SWPL would prefer the one with butter because it tastes better, even though it is more expensive. Proles have less sophisticated nervous systems and can't discern the subtle differences in flavour, and would prefer the one with margarine because its cheaper.

Heres a video of Julia Child talking about when Mc******s switched from frying their fries in beef tallow to oil, and how she stopped eating fries at that point:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DF31qCrclC0
1995
"When they first started out, their french fries were very good, and then the nutritionists got at them. That it turned out erroneous that beef tallow fat was bad, and that lard was bad and so forth. And so they changed it to some kind of nutritious oil and they've been kind of limp ever since. I never really eat them its too bad."

SWPL nervous system detects flavour of PUFA poison and avoids it. Proles do not and continue eating it.

I hate to say it, but the standard iceberg lettuce wedge with blue cheese dressing that they serve at every steak house. from prole to elite, truly is refreshing and delicious. I hate to say it, becuase everybody seems to agree, or else why would they serve this at so many different types of steak houses?

Also, love the theory about Italians being conservative, and Alice Waters as the liberal food alternative. I think there is a lot of truth in that, "not a hacker."

What a great topic -- it bears on another subject that is a perennial favourite of mine, although no one else ever seems to be interested in it, which is the disconcerting, alienating way it feels to change social classes, even if (especially if?) your new class is "higher" than the one you grew up in.

I think HS is right on the money with this one, and in fact I've had conversations with my wife that were virtually identical. I distinctly remember, earlier this year, saying to her something like, "Hey, isn't it weird how we don't eat the same things we grew up eating? Do you think that's because we run in different circles than we grew up in, or is it just that times have changed and everybody eats differently now?" I think it's the former.

On iceberg lettuce: as a good ol' high-prole family, we only *ever* had iceberg lettuce, and to this day I can hardly stand anything else in a salad. Romaine lettuce is flat, limp, and slimy, but iceberg is crisp and crunchy! No contest.

"Map - you're completely ignoring the quality of the food. McDonalds is 100% beef - all the lower-quality cuts ground up together. Even between chains, which all keep clean and sanitary, there are big differences in the quality of the food.

(HS - LA has been doing the letter grade for inspections for ages, and San Francisco just adopted it, too.)"

Quality is irrelevant without proper food handling. For example, all of McDonald's hamburgers are cooked gray all the way through. This means the burger is medium well to well done every time...guaranteeing that the food has no parasites. Yet, McDonald's burgers are still very soft.

For non-chains to cook burgers at the softness of a McDonald's, they have to cook slightly pink. Order anything that grays the meat and burger risks becoming tough. So, for non-chains, palatable burgers will tend to be cooked at the point of risking food poisoning. That is why many menus have disclaimers.

Half, food inspection ratings can be gamed. Big chains like McDonald's clean to avoid outbreaks, not to pass food inspections.

I mean, if New York is displaying letter grades for restaurant inspections, does that mean there is a bell curve? Most restaurants will be C's with the tails reflecting A's and B's and otherwise? Or is there grade inflation? After all, who would want to eat at a C restaurant?

"@map, excellent point. The superiority of SWPL food is so much bullshit."

I don't want to knock swpl food completely. I dropped $400 once for myself for a tasting menu with a wine pairing at the best Zagat rated restaurant in my city. The food was sublime and the kitchen was immaculate. I, however, cannot afford to eat that way on a regular basis.

There is a genetic component to food preferences.
Different foods can taste differently to different people. Some people are "super tasters" and find foods such as Brussels sprouts and grapefruit juice to be intensely bitter. They also find some spicy foods to be overwhelming.

As far as I (a British person) can tell the American Generation Gap is:

- Younger generation largely talk up their fine dining experiences, but generally eat overpriced diner food and gourmet versions of hamburger and pizzas and so on, a la Serious Eats.

- Older generation is slightly appalled by this and eats more real food.

On top of this, older people have worse taste buds, smell, teeth and digestion and this affects their food choice.

WASPs and North West Europeans (apart from the French) are not particularly foodie people though. They all have the potential for carefully made and high quality (even artisanal versions of their traditional dishes, from ryebread to kidney pudding, but are largely not that bothered.